Emerson College: Whiteytown on the Common

Do you wonder if there is a place in Boston where mid-century attitudes about black people still abound unfettered? Perhaps you have not read the Globe's piece about the tenure process at Emerson. It turns out that the college has only given tenure to three black people in its 129-year history. That's a lot of discrimination, even for Boston!

Our favorite sentence from the article:

Robbie McCauley, a performing arts professor who in 2007 became the first black person to receive tenure at Emerson without a lawsuit, said the plight of her two colleagues who were denied tenure shows that Emerson has a long way to go.

You don't say.

There are, of course, unexpected benefits of being denied tenure, if you are a black scholar. For instance, you will never settle down long enough to be arrested in your own home for no reason. Heck, with the rates that colleges pay adjunct faculty, you'll probably never own your own home in the first place!

Lots of people at Emerson are white. Only 3 percent of the student body is black, compared to 13 percent nationwide, and a mere 6 percent of Emerson's full time faculty is black, meaning that the college doesn't have to charge up its white privilege machine all that often in order to deny tenure to its black faculty.

Emerson is in the process of fending off one lawsuit by a spurned black faculty member, and a second, Roger House, agreed to drop his lawsuit in exchange for a second shot at tenure review. No word on the estimated time of arrival for Emerson's second black person to receive tenure at Emerson without a lawsuit.